OpenFX doubles down on Europe with Embed acquisition

Today OpenFX has agreed to acquire Embed, an Amsterdam-based embedded payments company. Alongside it, we're opening offices in London and Amsterdam, with a 20-member-strong team across product, growth, regulatory and compliance, part of our broader team of 120 across the US, UAE, India, and Singapore. With backing from European investors including Northzone and Atomico, Europe is now our largest commitment outside the United States.

The team

Embed was founded by Alex Schoonkind (CEO), Andrei Valeanu (COO), and Konstantin Indjov (CTO). Alex spent the decade before Embed at Form3, Verifone, and Ingenico — first working with Andrei at Ingenico, where Andrei was a compliance officer through the PSD2 transition, and with Konstantin at Verifone, where Konstantin was an engineering lead following Verifone's acquisition of Dimebox. Andrei later ran compliance operations at Uber Payments.

Full circle

Embed started out as a crypto-native payments business. The team later pivoted into traditional embedded payments due to an unfavourable regulatory environment for blockchain-based payments — building multi-party balance accounts, pay-ins, payouts, and the API for vertical SaaS platforms to plug into.

"We built this stack for a different use case, but the underlying infrastructure is exactly what a cross-border platform needs: virtual IBANs, multi-rail bank connectivity, EEA and UK coverage. Combining it with OpenFX's distribution is the right home for the technology." Alex Schoonkind, Co-Founder of Embed

Joining OpenFX brings the team back to where they started. The thesis Embed was originally built on — programmable money rails outperforming correspondent banking — is now the operating model across OpenFX's network: stablecoin settlement under the hood, sub-hour cross-border execution, $60B annualised TPV, and active corridors connecting the US, Europe, LatAm, the Middle East, and South/South-East Asia.

The European regulatory stack

Embed brings two regulated entities holding European payments licences: a Dutch Payment Institution, carrying EU passporting rights, and a UK Electronic Money Institution. We're supplementing this with a MiCAR licence, which will give OpenFX a comprehensive stablecoin payments regulatory stack across the EU and the UK.

Our recent investments in Europe reflect our intention to build for the long term - by holding licences in-house, hiring locally, operating local financial infrastructure, supervised by some of the most stringent regulators.

Plenty of work ahead.